Correspondence received in Child Support 277-01070000

The Electronic Document Classification Team (EDC) is responsible for the timely and accurate classifying, storage and retrieval of inbound correspondence for Child Support. EDC mainly processes incoming correspondence, however all staff across Services Australia may be required to open or receive incoming correspondence and packages.

EDC Service Officers can refer to useful contact information to process all incoming child support correspondence, mail and packages.

Child Support receives customer correspondence in many ways:

• secure messaging with document upload via:
• myGov, or
• the Express Plus Child Support mobile app
• unsecured messaging via:
• Services Australia portals (for contact and complaints/feedback)
• email (from domestic and overseas customers)
• fax (from domestic and overseas customers)
• post/courier to site address
• hand delivered correspondence to Services Australia sites including:
• service centres (metro and regional), or
• outreach services

Services Australia staff must send all correspondence received for Child Support customers immediately to the Child Support postal address. This includes correspondence that is hand delivered to a site or received via local fax.

There are very specific circumstance where customer correspondence can be split or edited.

If non-EDC Service Officers receive a document that contains multiple customer information within the same document, or a document contains information that needs to be actioned across two or more different service areas (such as an objection to a care decision and a Change of Assessment (COA) application in same document), this correspondence should be split. If unsure, check with a SSO or contact EDC.

In limited circumstances, EDC will edit correspondence received from a customer if the document contains:

• more than one customer’s information on a single page/s and it is not reconciliation information from an employer,
• incorrect CSID and/or customer name, however the rest of the correspondence is correct
• information provided by a child under 18 of the case and is not part of a COA, Objection or Part 6a Objection process, and
• offensive or inappropriate content

COA, Objection and Part 6a staff should refer to Open Exchange of information for Child Support customers for more information on editing customer correspondence.

To have correspondence split or edited by EDC, authorised non-EDC Service Officers can follow the instructions as outlined in Correspondence Cuba Process Help.

Once EDC have actioned the request, the new edited/split document will be reattached to the customer’s record. In some cases EDC may request additional information before editing or splitting a document.

See View Correspondence Window Help for more information on detaching a document.

Correspondence that has been attached to the incorrect customer may be rectified by non-EDC Service Officers with the correct Cuba authorisation (otherwise escalate to an SSO, Team Leader or EDC).

Where the correct customer is:

• identifiable, reassign the correspondence to the correct customer from the View correspondence screen. This process will reassign the document to the correct customer, create an intray on their record and will also remove the intray created on the incorrect customer’s record
• not identifiable, detach the correspondence from the incorrect customer’s record, see Correspondence Cuba Process Help

Where the correspondence is on the correct customer, but is categorised incorrectly, update the category of the document. Once actioned, the original intray will be deleted and replaced with a new one based on the new category chosen.

Correspondence received either via Online Document Lodgement (secure messaging) from a customer, or CSBOS uploads directly to the customer or organisation record and is not managed by EDC. This correspondence is categorised by the customer/organisation who provided it. From time to time, there may be categorisation issues with the correspondence received via one of these channels.

Correspondence received via:

• online document lodgement flows directly into the View Correspondence window, Service Officers can action these documents in the same way as any document that has been received via EDC (correspondence can be reassigned, detached or re-categorised)
• financial institutions through CSBOS is uploaded directly to the Payer Collection window. If the information contained in the response is incorrect, missing or has any issues, contact a SSO for this issue to be rectified, as EDC are unable to action this

If the correspondence on the customer record appears to have missing pages, or there is an image quality issue (which includes not being able to view (open) the image), EDC may be able to rectify the issue.

Non-EDC staff can use the Document retrieval/image review request macro for:

• postal mail correspondence where non-EDC staff identify there may be missing pages during the EDC scanning process. For correspondence received by fax, the document on the customer record is the original, as faxes are received electronically.
• correspondence that cannot be viewed due to poor image quality or errors in uploading an image
• correspondence received by EDC that was manually receipted

Only documents received in Child Support since June 2010 are viewable in the View Correspondence window.

Requests received by EDC via the macro will be actioned accordingly and depends on whether the original document is still retained on site offsite in a document storage facility. If the document is being kept off-site, then a EDC RMU officer will forward a request to have a copy of the document retrieved.

Once the original documents are obtained by EDC, they will be:

• scanned and uploaded to Cuba, or
• uploaded to Cuba as an email PDF document, and:
• attached to the customer’s record, and
• a copy of the PDF is also forwarded to the requesting Service Officer

The EDC Service Officer will place an annotation in Cuba noting the request has been finalised and where the document can be found in the View Correspondence window.

If the correspondence is a notification that an email the customer has attempted to send to the agency has been quarantined:

• contact the customer to advise an email has been received from them that cannot be opened, and
• ask the customer to resend their information without any encrypted or media content. In some cases resending information via a different channel may be appropriate. Authenticated online document lodgement is preferred, however the customer may also elect to send via fax or post

If non-EDC staff consider the email should be released from quarantine, consider the appropriateness of the release and seek support from a Team Leader, keeping in mind the Agency’s Cyber Security policy.